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Remember Munich, and its city council's 2003 decision to rip out Microsoft Windows and Office, and to replace them with free software? It was a seminal moment for open source, when Microsoft brought its heaviest guns to bear – in the shape of Steve Ballmer, no less, who made the city an offer it couldn't refuse – and failed

The consolidated IT of the city of Munich is reporting at CeBIT 2010 on converting their workstations to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration to the free office package was finalized for Munich. All 15,000 office PCs of the city council will work on OpenOffice, under Linux or Windows.

Over €10 million has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city's own Linux platform. The study is based on around 11,000 migrated workplaces within Munich's city administration as well as 15,000 desktops that are equipped with a FOSS office suite.

The German city of Munich's migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is "in time, in budget and on track", says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city's fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

In Denmark in an open letter to the mayor, city council and the IT manager in Lyngby-Taarbaek Municipality, the Virum School student council is now targeting sharp criticism against the decision to replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.

Munich is now using a unified desktop system, Limux, its own distribution based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux on 14,000 of its total 15,000 desktops, spread over 51 offices across the city. That is 2,000 more than it's intended goal of using Limux on 80 % of its desktops.

A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city's IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

Steve Ballmer apparently likes open source. Well, so long as it drives Windows revenue. And doesn't replace any. Ever. In fact, as he said at an event in Microsoft last week in London that he hopes to see all open-source innovation going to Windows, rather than Linux (more below).